Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers

Until the mid-1700s, law was not thought of as a science or profession. Most Virginians adhered to the English country tradition that considered law to be a local and personal affair. The growth of cities and business, however, guaranteed that disputes would spill over county boundaries. As law proliferated and became more complex, it encouraged the growth of a legal profession composed of men who shared specialized knowledge of law and the courts.

Endorsements

“Provides new and valuable evidence of the degree to which the legal profession had its way in remodeling the judicial system of Jefferson’s Virginia.”
– North Carolina Historical Review

Law, Land, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800 (Feb 16, 1997)
Eileen Spring. Published February 1997. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-4642-1. Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative …

Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations (Oct 7, 2005)
Laura Kalman. Published October 2005. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-2966-0. The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they associated with Yale’s past and with the social climate in which they …

Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Aug 13, 2001)
Bruce H. Mann. Published August 2001. Order online through The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN: 978-0-8078-5365-8. Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analyzing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, …

Post navigation

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

About ASLH

The American Society for Legal History was founded in 1956 to foster interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching in the broad field of legal history. Although based in the United States, its purview and membership are international in scope. The Society sponsors a book series, Studies in Legal History, and a quarterly journal, the Law and History Review, both of which are published for the Society by Cambridge University Press.